The Quiet Cage

Chapter One

Meg has a lamp with a scarf over it. The whole room looks soft and brown. As I get on the bed, I tell myself that's a good sign. People who put a scarf over a lamp have already planned how they want the night to go. They have a picture in their head. I'm in it. All I have to do is not wreck it.

I have a version too. I've had one since our third date. It's pretty detailed. In it, I'm calm. I don't overthink every little thing. I just let it happen. That's the part I'm most worried about.

"Hi," she says, which is a funny thing to say to a guy who's already on top of you.

She laughs at herself for saying it, and I love her a little for the laugh.

That's the thing about Meg. She catches herself.

She works in insurance, the part where they figure out what something was really worth after it's already broken.

She talks about it like it's the most normal job in the world, which it is.

She has a way of joking about her own clumsiness that makes me feel like clumsiness is allowed in here.

So I think, okay. Clumsiness is allowed in here.

We've been building up to this the polite modern way.

Three dinners and a lot of texting. Both of us saying the careful things you say.

No pressure. Whatever feels right. And both of us knowing for a week that tonight was the night the careful things get cashed in.

I brushed my teeth twice before I came out.

There's a condom in my wallet that's been in there long enough that I checked the date on it in the restaurant bathroom.

That's not something I'll ever say out loud.

At dinner I was good. I want that on the record.

I was funny and warm and quick with stories.

I told one about a Swedish crib that had to be written in nine languages and somehow sounded like a threat in English.

She laughed. I even got the waiter laughing.

I ordered the second bottle without thinking twice.

All of it felt easy. All of it felt like me.

And none of it helped once we got back to her place.

I can talk a good game. I always have. But talking is one thing. Actually doing it is another. And my body has never been able to keep up with my mouth.

She kisses me and it's good. It's really good.

For a while I stop thinking so hard. That's when it works best, when I stop thinking.

Her hands are under my shirt. Mine are figuring her out.

There's a plan in my head, a list of steps, and I keep almost reaching for it before making myself let go.

The plan is the enemy. Everyone knows that.

You can't think your way through this. You just have to do it.

She reaches down.

And then I'm gone.

I don't know how else to say it. One second I'm a guy in a warm room with a woman who likes me.

The next I'm somewhere else. Up near the ceiling, watching.

I can see us. I can see the back of my own head.

All at once I'm aware of my breathing. I notice where my elbow is.

I'm aware of my body, which has stopped doing the one thing it's supposed to do without being asked.

Come on, I tell it.

Nothing.

I try the tricks I've taught myself. The little private ones you pick up over ten years of near-misses.

I try picturing something. I try not picturing anything.

I try telling myself it doesn't matter, which is the fastest way to make it matter more.

I try wanting it so hard the wanting will drag my body along behind it.

My body just watches me want. Calm and uninterested.

Like a dog that's decided not to fetch. The harder I reach, the further it goes.

It's the one contest where trying is the whole problem.

And I've never known how to stop trying.

Meg is patient. She's so patient the patience turns into its own spotlight.

She kisses my neck and says something soft.

Her hand keeps up its kind, hopeful work.

I lie there running the math everybody in my spot runs.

Whether it'll turn around. Whether if I relax.

Whether if I picture. Whether if I stop picturing.

Every second I spend on the math is a second I'm not doing the thing.

And she can feel that. Of course she can.

She figures out broken things for a living.

The lamp isn't helping now. The soft brown light is bright enough to see by.

I have a small cock. I've known it a long time.

I've made peace with it on most days. But not here.

Not with the light on and her hand wrapped around me.

My pants and underwear are down around my thighs.

There's no hiding anything. Right now I'm completely soft.

There's nothing for her to work with. And she can see it.

She's too gentle to say anything about it, but she's not pretending she hasn't noticed.

"Hey," she says. She pulls back to look at me. Her face is doing the worst thing it can do, which is being nice about it. "It's okay."

"Yeah," I say. My voice comes out fine. That's the cruel part. The voice always comes out fine. "Yeah, sorry, I think I'm just—"

I don't finish it. There's no honest end to that sentence. I'm just what. Nervous. Broken. Twenty-nine.

She rolls onto her side, which is a mercy, and pulls the sheet up over both of us, which is a bigger one. For a while we just lie there in the low light. I look at the scarf on the lamp and think about the person who owns that scarf. How she planned tonight. And how I've done it again.

Here's where I'd like to tell you I fell apart.

That would be more dignified than what I actually do.

Instead, I turn my head and see that she's embarrassed too.

Not for me. For herself. She's lying there thinking it's her fault.

That she wasn't enough. That she did something wrong.

I know that kind of thinking because I watched my ex-girlfriend Dana do it for two years.

And she was never once right about it. I can't stand to watch another woman do it because of me.

So I say, "This isn't about you. I need you to hear that it's so completely not about you that it's almost funny."

"You don't have to."

"I do, though. If you take one thing from tonight, it's that you were the best part. The lamp comes in second."

And she laughs. It jumps out of her, a real one.

Her face lets go of something. I would burn the building down to keep that going.

So I keep going. I tell her the scarf was a bold move and I respect it.

I tell her about the condom in my wallet and the date I checked.

Which I would never say out loud except that it makes her put a hand over her mouth and shake.

Giving her that is the best thing I do all night.

I turn the disaster into a joke. I'm good at that.

I always have been. I can take something painful and turn it into a story before it has time to hurt too much.

She walks me to the door around one in the morning in a big t-shirt and hugs me for a long time. She says we should still get dinner. I say yes, definitely. We both know, kindly, that we won't.

Outside it's cold the way spring nights get cold to punish you for trusting them.

I don't call a car right away. I walk for a bit first. Past the closed dry cleaner and the bar still leaking noise.

I do what I always do. I relive the night back to myself until I can live with it.

Funny thing happened. Struck out again. Gave a nice woman a good story for her friends.

The sweet guy who couldn't. There are worse things to be than the sweet guy who couldn't.

It usually works. I'm good at cutting a night down to its funniest true line.

The same way I take a forty-page assembly guide and find the one warning that keeps a kid's fingers out of the hinge.

Cut everything that isn't holding weight.

Keep the part that's true and useful and reads fast. I've turned a lot of bad nights into good lines.

I could do a whole set. The wallet condom with the expiration date.

The time I called a woman by her street name instead of her name.

The date who asked me, nicely, forty minutes in, if I was maybe more of a friends person.

They kill at parties. If the party's small and I've had two drinks and nobody asks a follow-up.

The trouble is I'm twenty-nine and I've never once had sex.

Not with Meg. Not with Dana. Not with anyone.

I've never even had a handjob or had someone go down on me.

My whole life, the dinners and the teeth-brushing and the wallet, is built around a line I've never crossed.

And standing on a cold sidewalk at one in the morning I'm starting to think I might not be built to cross it.

Other guys fell off this cliff once at nineteen and never thought about it again.

I've been standing at the edge for ten years taking careful notes on the drop.